Although it is conventional wisdom that innovation requires free mind, diversity, or creativity all of which are closely associated with political and organizational decentralization, it is in fact more politically centralized countries in East Asia that successfully capitalized on innovation to catapult their economies onto the growth trajectory. Scholars have thus wondered if this is an exception rather a rule. Are more centralized countries innovative? Existing empirical research has produced mixed results. This study introduces a new perspective on this issue. Rather than the degree of centralization found in formal institutions, we focus on non-institutional or informal dimensions of centralization particularly associated with culture. Using Hofstede's cross-national dataset capturing national culture, we explore how different dimensions of national culture are linked to national innovative capacity as proxied by patents. Our preliminary findings from the analysis of 34 OECD member states based on the patent data extracted from the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) database suggest that non-institutional dimensions of centralization account more for the variations in national rates of patents per capita than more formal aspects of centralization measured by traditional political datasets such as POLCON. While cultural aspects have been examined in technology management at the individual and the firm level, this study fills a gap in the existing literature by exploring their relationship at the national level. More research is clearly needed to explore the roles of non-institutional features facilitating or hampering innovation.
This study aims to find the factors of scientists' creative thoughts by observing directly their laboratories in Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology
a b s t r a c tThis study examined fouling characteristics of a commercial grade electrospun nanofiber membrane, which has the nominal pore size of 0.23 µm and the thickness of 165 µm. A set of filtration experiments were carried out in a bench-scale equipment using real wastewater with the mixed liquor suspended solid of 6,500 mg/L. Critical flux was experimentally determined and analyzed using mathematical models such as pore blocking, pore constriction, and cake formation equations. Techniques for physical cleaning of the membrane were applied and compared, including periodic pump stop and backwash. The efficiency of chemical cleaning was measured using NaOCl solutions of different concentrations. Scanning electron microscopy was applied to examine the membrane surfaces before and after chemical cleaning. Results showed that the electrospun membrane has potential for high fouling resistance and effective cleaning. The critical flux seems to exist between 20 and 30 L/m 2 h and the cake formation model resulted in the best fit to the experimental data. The transmembrane pressure increase was reduced by 88% after the application of backwash and the efficiency of chemical cleaning ranged from 84% to 91%.
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